This is Allison and I am here with Brett and as you know we are recording this in a very strange circumstance that I don't know if there's a ton of historical parallel for before but we'll discuss it some. So we

figured that in the midst of this coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic, it would do good for us to sort of use our

platform to talk about this, talk about what is happening, what it all means

from our perspective is Marxist, how we can respond to it, and just sort of how to wrap our minds around this really intense and difficult to understand thing.

I know for me personally, I'm having a hard time, you can just processing some of what's happening here in California under lockdown and

ensure that other people are as well so I'm hoping we'll be able to sort of all come

together and at least get some ideas out around this.

Yeah, definitely. You know I I'm here in Nebraska. I know the coasts have been shut down more intensely than the Midwest, but it's obviously hitting here. I have a good friend who I actually, I work with sometimes do day labor gigs with who you know I've seen in the last month who just got diagnosed with COVID 19 after coming back from Georgia and to hear to hear firsthand his experiences engaging

with the health care system trying to get the test getting charged for getting

the test trying to get a hold of a doctor after being confirmed

that he has it and not being able to get a hold of a doctor.

It's really highlighting just how incapable our health care system is to take on this emergency and it's only

going to get a lot worse and I think one thing we should all keep in mind with

pandemics it really tests the human imagination to conceptualize not only with the

concept of exponential growth but the idea of a lag time that what we're doing

right now is sets the stage for what happens in two weeks. So a lot of

people are looking around them and saying well the numbers are pretty low,

nobody I personally know is sick, I think everybody's overreactingacting but what they don't understand is that we're not overreacting,

we're acting for what's going to happen in two weeks. There's this lag that occurs in pandemics.

And so to think about these different things it really sort of puts pressure on, you know, how our brains evolved like, you know, what sort of problems our brains evolved to grasp and understand.

And this is really putting a lot of that to test. And I know we're going to get into this more but it's also showing us in sort of a condensed time frame

what climate change is going to look like what we're going to have to be prepared for to deal with that crises and it's similar to this

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